Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for November 21, 2013
Over at the WCEG Equitablog:
- Evening Must-Read: Clay Shirky on the Extraordinary Healthcare.gov Management Failure…
- Effects on the Labor Market of ObamaCare Implementation
- Fear the Global Investment Shortfall, and What It Means for Long-Run Growth
- The Utility and Disutility of Rational Expectations: Wednesday Focus
- Olivier Blanchard Speaks Delphicly on Managing International Capital Flows
- IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard Speaks Delphicly on the Appropriate Inflation Target
- Public Administration vs. Political Science
- It Is Very Difficult to Have a Technocratic Conversation with This Generation’s Republican Officeholders: Barney Frank and Dick Cheney Edition
Plus:
- Aaron Carroll: A pickle for conservative states refusing the Medicaid expansion: "The ACA covers most Americans making less than 138% of the poverty line through the Medicaid expansion. Because everyone thought the expansion would happen nationwide, they only wrote in subsidies for people making more than 100% of the poverty line.... Now there’s a problem--people making too little in states that refuse the expansion may not get subsidies, and therefore they may not be able to get insurance in the exchanges.... Things are different for legal immigrants.... In order to make sure that all legal residents were covered, the ACA instead provides subsidies for legal immigrants to go get inurance in the exchanges, no matter how little they make. So we’re going to have a potential situation next year where poor non-immigrants will get nothing in states that refuse the Medicaid expansion, but poor immigrants will get subsidies to buy private insurance.... It’s hard to see this playing out well politically..."
- David Glasner: The Internal Contradiction of Quantitative Easing: "I can’t help observing... that the two main arguments made by critics... do not exactly coexist harmoniously.... QE is ineffective... dangerous.... The tension might at least have given a moment’s pause.... Nor... does the faux populism of the attack on a rising stock market and... crocodile tears for helpless retirees living off... interest... coexist harmoniously with... the same characters... (e.g., Freedomworks, CATO, the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) for privatizing social security.... I am also waiting for an explanation of why abused pensioners... can’t cash in the CDs.... In which charter... does one find it written that a perfectly secure real rate of interest of not less than 2% on any debt instrument issued by the US government shall always be guaranteed?"
- Robert Skidelsky: Four Fallacies of the Second Great Depression: "One should simply have asked the Swabian housewife.... The government cannot spend money it does not have.... The national debt is deferred taxation.... The national debt is a burden on future generations..."
- David Keohane and Izabella Kaminska: Zhou seems a little flustered: "We were going to be slightly snarky in the face of Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the People’s Bank of China... the lack of a timetable and the ambiguity of phrasing making this seem rather similar to what we’ve heard in the past--but then we saw this from Neil Mellor at BoNYM and felt bad: 'However, although a timetable was absent... this announcement constituted the beginnings of a new era for financial markets and no superlative would overstate its significance.' Oops. Mellor may well have a point... rowing back a bit on timetable-snark [does] seem sensible..."
- Richard Mayhew: November ObamaCare enrollment pace: "A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track.... Pennsylvania (a federal exchange state) seems to be seeing a quadrupling of pace in the first two weeks of November.... This is evidence... people are still willing to look for a good deal on the Exchanges..."
And:
Jonathan Cohn: I Just Lost My Insurance Because of Obamacare. What Do I Do? A step-by-step guide to replacing your health insurance | Michael D. Bauer and Glenn D. Rudebusch: Expectations for Monetary Policy Liftoff | David Dollar et al.: Growth still is good for the poor | Stephanie Paige Ogburn: Missing Data from Arctic One Cause of "Pause" in Temperature Rise | Q4 GDP Tracking: 1.4%/Yr | Martin Wolf: Why the future looks sluggish |